We share insights from our practice-based experimentation with ‘feral’ ways of sensemaking in the context of creative transformational practices. Drawing on three art and design research projects, we discuss how feral ways–open-ended, spontaneous, welcoming indeterminacy – may foster more-than-human co-creation of knowledge and data, and nurture shifts from anthropocentric ‘making sense of’ to relational ‘making sense-with’ other-than-human creatures. Through our cases, we illustrate how experimenting with feralness can foreground issues of power, agency, and control in the currently human-centric discourses around data, technology, and sensemaking in eco-social transformation. Our insights may nurture critical more-than-human perspectives in creative eco-social inquiries.
The installation presents our ongoing investigation of feral ways of knowing, being, and living-with diverse more-than-human ecologies. On display are feral data artifacts such as woven sashes, multispecies tattoos, short dérive films, and an eel trap, all which speak of environmental knowledge and cosmologies in various more-than-human habitats including Colombian chagras, Bohemian forest, Croatian wetlands, and the Gunditjmara Country. Participants are invited to spend time with the artifacts and delve into the stories – of feral relationships and care as well as power and structural inequalities – that they weave together.
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